Oliver James: Face the facts

Chatting to the head of a leading TV channel, I wondered why he doesn't use his organ to inseminate his viewers with ecological issues. "Oh dear," he replied, "I can't face it, it's just too depressing. And anyway, no one would watch."

Now, I know this chap very well and have done so for many years. He is a decent, moral person (rare in a TV executive). As a youth, he served his time battling for Old Labour issues and, as a grown-up, he has not become a greed-is-good New Labour fellow traveller. He is still exercised about female equality and economic inequality, willing to commission stuff about them (which no one watches either). Yet, try to get him to face up to the fast-approaching apocalypse that is global warming, and it's an issue too far. He is not alone.

Most of us groan as we buy another shiny plastic toy for our nippers or, when we move house, sigh with shame as the sheer exhaustion of properly disposing of our old fridge prevents us from doing so. We hop into our gas-guzzling motors, knowing we should have walked or taken public transport. We fail to do the right thing by our outdated computers and mobile phones. Like my friend, all too often, the environment is one worthy cause too far for our limited inner resources and it's just too depressing to take on board.

It's curious that it should be so. For most of my life, like everyone of my generation (I'm 51), we lived in fear of nuclear obliteration. Aged 16, I recall lying on the grass in Hyde Park, London, and picturing what the mushroom cloud would look like as it rose behind the Hilton Hotel skyscraper. Studies of that era suggest nearly everyone had dreams in which the bomb went off. Why are we not equally prone to Soylent Green fantasies of the devastation that will follow global warming? Why can we relate to the totalitarian ideas of The Matrix so much more easily?

Escapism is easier

The starting point for any answer lies with Sigmund Freud. In the last 15 years, a substantial body of scientific evidence has demonstrated that he was spot-on about our need to repress uncomfortable truths. In the case of Anglo-Saxon peoples, for example, we live in a rose-tinted bubble of positive illusions, highly defended from reality. In a series of experiments over the last 20 years, Shelley Taylor of the University of California has demonstrated that we imagine our friends like us more than they really do, and that we tend to assume nasty things, such as illnesses or car crashes, are less likely to happen than is really the case.

We also dress up the past to suit the present. When university students are asked to recall their pre-university grades, nearly all of them slightly inflate what they scored, whereas hardly any remember doing worse than was truly the case. Parents of high-achieving children put it down to their enlightened nurture and blame genes for characteristics of their offspring that they dislike.

Taylor claims this kind of self-deception is a universal core of mental health. Americans who are depressed are much less likely to live in the bubble of positive illusions, and are said to suffer from 'depressive realism'. That people who have an accurate perception should be seen as less mentally healthy than self-deceivers seems implausible, and indeed, the universality of this escapist mental strategy is highly debatable.

Reality check

For one thing, by no means is the positive bubble found everywhere. If anything, the Japanese and several other Asiatic societies are prone to a negative bias in their illusions. In such collectivist societies, self-criticism and modesty are much applauded and there is a greater tolerance of the negative.

For another, as Lynne Myers of University College London has shown in her studies, about 15% of Britons and Americans have repressor personalities. This type avoid negativity like the plague, unable to recall bad childhood experiences and quickly using mental tricks to distract themselves if exposed to painful events. When Myers took these people out of the equation, the bubble of positive illusions largely disappeared, suggesting that most people do not embellish reality as much as Taylor claims.

Which is not to deny that many Anglo-Americans may be almost delusionally self-deceiving, or the truth of TS Eliot's statement that "humankind cannot bear much reality".

Anger is another uncomfortable emotion, which takes some handling. When experimental subjects were angered by frustrating tasks, compared with anger-free subjects, they made greater use of the defence known as 'projection': instead of feeling the anger themselves, they were more likely to attribute it to others.

These studies indicate the kind of mental tactics my TV executive employs when binning a proposal for a six-part series on the destruction of rainforests, or how I cope with my guilt when filling up the tank of my large, gas-guzzling car.

Studies by the American psychologist Tim Kasser show that people who are strongly motivated by the pursuit of money, fame and appearances (physical and social) are much less likely to be concerned about the environment. When asked to play a game which entails choosing between long-term sustainability and short-term profits in the running of a forestry business, sure enough, the materialists put profits first.

Money talks

Such people also tend to be the ones who end up running countries and corporations. But the core problem is that, while most of us would put sustainability ahead of dosh in theory, in practice we are not as different from our rulers as we would like to think. If you do not believe me, picture the unsustainable consumption you have engaged in during the last week: it's not a pretty sight.

Because we are all (or nearly all) materialists now, and because most of us feel tremendously guilty about the damage we are doing, in order to keep going we have to repress. This mental gymnastics must reach olympic standard in our leaders.

Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are utterly committed to economic growth and for that to keep happening, we have to keep on consuming new products. I have talked to two of Blair's key advisers at some length, and the fact is that the Treasury refuses to countenance any ecological legislation that threatens affluence. Yet, according to my informants, neither Blair nor Brown is stupid. Like my TV executive chum, they know perfectly well that unless we call a halt to our profligate consumption, their children or children's children are doomed.

Travelling last year to seven countries around the world interviewing people for a book about our "affluenza", I encountered the same problem everywhere. It remains the same as when Erich Fromm wrote his book The Sane Society in 1955: so long as we are more motivated to have than to be, we shall continue down the tunnel of consumerism. We shall do so despite knowing full well that the light at the end is not the sun. It's the train.

· Oliver James' new book Affluenza - How to be Middle Class, Successful and Fulfilled will be published in the spring